 Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency
Lately I've been on a rant about the declining quality of
products, services and infrastructure in our society, as corporations
and governments alike cut corners to try to reduce costs. It's slow and
inexorable, and the strategy seems to be that if the quality of
everything declines, no one will be able to complain about anything in
particular, and if it declines slowly enough, we won't notice.
Well, we notice. Cheap, toxic Chinese crap that breaks as soon as
you open it. Electronics that are designed to be replaced after two
years with something newer. Non-existent, indifferent, dreadful,
ignorant service. Infrastructure services like phone networks and
utilities that are constantly failing. Health and insurance services
that suddenly, after obscene price escalation, aren't available at all.
Oligopoly and warranty price-gouging. CDs and DVDs and
low-energy lightbulbs and rechargeable batteries that break down in a
month. Roads and bridges and water-pipes that are collapsing before our
eyes.
The objective is to get you to throw everything away and buy a new
one as quickly as possible, by making the products themselves cheaper
to buy than to repair. It is all part of the process of getting us
addicted to consumption, by requiring us to do more and more of it. It
is also part of a process of continuously lowering expectations, so you
get used to crappy products, crappy services and crappy infrastructure,
and accept that this is how it must be, and how it has always been.
I've been in 400-year-old houses that, with next to no
maintenance, look better and are in better shape than 20-year-old
houses that have been money pits since they were built. So there is no
question in my mind that, if we had governments with the balls to make
it unlawful (and hence unprofitable) to sell crappy products and
provide crappy service and infrastructure, we would all live better,
and more responsibly, and have a lot more time on our hands for things
other than buying crap.
But there's a bigger problem looming with shoddy goods, services
and infrastructure. They have an extraordinarily high maintenance and
replacement cost, measured both in dollars and in hours of work. When
the economy is humming, this is manageable. But what happens when an
economic collapse occurs or a permanent resource scarcity emerges? What
if suddenly people cannot afford to replace last year's load of crap
with this year's? What happens when the cost to transport the raw
materials stolen from struggling nations to the Chinese slave-labour
factories, and then to transport the manufactured crap from China to
centralized super-warehouses and then to super-stores in distant
mega-malls and then to your home and then to the toxic landfill sites
back in struggling nations, suddenly becomes prohibitively high? What
happens when the phone lines and servers and networks and power grids
go down and the utilities can't afford to pay workers to fix them
because none of the customers can afford to pay their bills? Or because
some new disease has so spooked everyone that the people who maintain
the shoddy, vulnerable, fragile, under-serviced infrastructure on which
we depend so heavily just refuse to show up for work at any price?
I've done some study of the impact on infrastructure of economic
collapses (depressions, currency collapses, runaway inflation etc.) and
also the impact on infrastructure of severe disease outbreaks throughout history -- and the lesson is that
maintenance of infrastructure shuts down when either occurs. In past
that hasn't been too bad, because the infrastructure was built to last
and because people weren't that dependent on it anyway. But today, with
shoddy, under-maintained infrastructure and our utter dependence on it,
and on each other, globally, to do anything and everything,
we have a disaster waiting
to happen. Simulations suggest that in a pandemic 60% of infrastructure
maintenance people would refuse to show up for work. In a depression,
infrastructure is just left to crumble until the
depression ends and there's money in governnment coffers to start
maintaining it again. Telephone lifelines therefore become unusable,
not because workers aren't available to fix broken lines, but because
the
utilities can't afford to pay them and they can't afford to
work for nothing.
Imagine how your life would change if you suddenly had to make
do without telephone lines, without Internet connections, without
reliable electricity to power your information and entertainment
devices (not to mention your kitchen appliances), without access to all
the files on hard drives and servers, without home delivery
of fuels. How dependent is your livelihood, your connection to the
people you love, your every activity that brings joy and meaning to
your life, your very ability to exist, on infrastructure we all take
for granted?
I live in a community well outside the city, where phone and
Internet and power go off at least once a month. It's
infuriating. It makes you feel completely helpless. In the dead of
winter, it's terrifying.
What will we do when the infrastructure breaks down, not just
intermittently but regularly, for extended periods of days, weeks,
months at a time?
We will, of course, do what we must. We will find ways to do
without. We will regretfully abandon the people we love who are not in
walking distance, and hope that someone who is in walking distance to
them will connect with them, and we will likewise look for people close
at hand to live with, love, work with, help out and be helped by. We will,
many if not most of us, cease to be employed, and have to find new employment that
is not dependent on communication and transportation infrastructure.
We will dress for comfort rather than fashion. We will relearn to do
things 'by hand'.
We will learn to take care of ourselves and each other, and our
electronic and virtual communities will gradually be supplanted by
physical communities.
Physically, we can do all these things. The problem is that we are
now addicted to so many of the activities, conveniences and pleasures
that only a functioning infrastructure can offer. So we are going to go
through a massive, collective withdrawal. It is not our physical
ability to transition to a different way of living that I'm worried
about, arduous though that will be (read The Long Emergency for some
scenarios). It is our psychological ability to make such a transition.
I'm not sure most of us are up for it. Just as few of us could survive
in the wilderness by ourselves today, I suspect few of us could survive in an
electronically and rapid-transport-disabled world.
It will be like suddenly waking up blind. For many, it will be
devastating, just too hard, more trouble than it's worth. For them, a
life without all the things our civilization has addicted us to, simply
won't be worth living. Are you ready for this? Is it even possible to be ready for this? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
